


Memories of Her

by SerphenySlayer



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: F/M, Feelings, ch 90 spoliers, memories acquired from titan shifter, occasional ch 92 spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-21
Updated: 2017-04-21
Packaged: 2018-10-22 03:33:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,210
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10688916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SerphenySlayer/pseuds/SerphenySlayer
Summary: After Armin acquires Bertolt's memories, thoughts of Annie are constantly felt to the point where he begins to feel her differently than before.





	Memories of Her

Memories of Her Hey guys, this is my first ever fic on this site, so there is a possibility that some of you Aruani shippers and fanfic veterans will be frowning at some of my mistakes and maybe run-on sentences here. This is created after chapter 90 several months after seeing the ocean. This also contains a small glimpse of a certain scene in chapter 92! After Armin ate Bertoldt, I like to believe that he also inherited his emotions of how he feels about Annie. Isayama never puts any unnecessary content in the manga that isn’t relevant to the plot, so the fact that Bertoldt having a crush on Annie must mean that it had some importance in the manga for existing. This got me thinking: could Isayama have purposefully had Armin eat Bertoldt so that it could quite possibly cause Armin to sympathize with her and have further feelings stemmed from Bertoldt’s memories? We know for a fact that there was some type of respect/chemistry between them before she was found out. After all, she spared his life TWICE. Anyway, let me know what you think! :D

***

At first, Armin dreams of a village. No- a hometown. _His_ hometown. It looks different than what he and Eren and Mikasa grew up in. The way he knows that it’s in a vastly different civilization, is that it seems to have things that he never knew existed. Towers made of more than just brick. Men wearing uniforms that somehow seem more sophisticated than their own. Even their everyday clothes divert from what he is used to seeing from the people of Paradis.

Yes, now they know. The people within the walls, the Paradians, aren’t the only people alive in the world. They know there are others. Much more technologically advanced than they are, and he sees it just from a glance into the memories of the person he’d never thought to share. Since he had turned, he had been occasionally plagued with nightmares. Giant hulking figures of men who had once been human, now reduced as titan pawns tumbling out of bizarre machines that soar through the sky. He sees in the memory a middle-aged woman with deep brown hair almost reminding him of the same shade as Bertoldt’s. He sees a smile on her cinnamon colored face that seems to crack at the edges from years of labor. In another memory, he catches sight of a familiar face: a seven-year-old Reiner Braun. He looks different. His hair looks shorter, and there is not yet a trace of the worry and crease in his eyebrows as he had when they joined the scouting legion so long ago. He also sees another boy whose face is unknown to him. His hair is also dark, but it’s cropped back due to its bristled nature, and he grins cheekily in the memory as he takes Bertoldt’s hand to some unknown place.

And then…he sees _her_.

Through the eyes of Bertoldt, he finds flashes of her face. They’re only fleeting at first. It’s almost as if he were secretly watching her, careful not to get caught. Image after image of Annie pops up frequently; training, eating at the mess hall in the military post, and sometimes when she thinks she’s alone: in her room.

But it isn’t Bertoldt’s images of her that draw him in. It’s his _feelings for her._

Vaguely, Armin wonders whether Eren feels any emotional content from the memories he has of his father, because what he feels quite frankly, shocks him.

The emotions he gets from seeing Annie, feel like a warm kind of feeling. Like the kind that comes with flying with maneuver gear for the first time. It’s exhilarating as well as terrifying, and you can’t help but feel free at the same time there’s a possibility of plummeting towards your death in one wrong move. A swooping kind of incredibly warm happy feeling.

Seeing Annie in these images accompanied by that sensation, draws him in, in an unexpected way. The more he dreams, the more he craves to see these tid-bit flashbacks of her. Even the mere sensation from watching the beads of sweat drip down the edge of her temple as she spars, the way she adjusts her bun, and the way the wind blows her stray blonde hair, creates a magnitude of sensations within his gut as if he’s soaring through the sky.

Yet at the same time, he feels an uncontrollable urge to cry. He cannot explain this, and he has no clue why something as happy as the image of her can make him feel anguished and suddenly lonely. In fact, he is so puzzled and overwhelmed by the rush of the former’s emotions, that he fails to notice and pinpoint that what he is feeling-what he _himself_ is feeling- is a genuine heartache.

He wakes up in a sweat; the memory of her eyes, her silky hair dancing in the wind, and the way her cold blue-grey eyes look at him, sends a chill to his heart. For a week now, he had been plagued of memories of the former colossal titan shifter, nothing too dramatic, nothing that doesn’t speak a longing to return to the place he once called home.

But its memories of Annie Leonhardt that cause him to become quiet during titan shifting training with Eren and Hange; quiet at the dinner table when Connie makes a joke that sends everybody laughing, and especially quiet when he finds himself alone in his room staring off into space. He is unable to get her out of his mind. Sometimes when he wakes up from these recurring dreams, he feels a tear running down his cheek. In a small morbid thought, he is reminded of the colossal titan’s tear in his dream a year ago.

He also reminds himself that there is no way he can talk to her, not while she’s crystallized deep within the innermost walled city. He knows she has committed crimes against his past comrades. Knows that she had betrayed them, and there is little to no chance of her ever gaining their forgiveness. It’s this fact that that causes him to become greatly melancholic. He knows that she had no other choice but to do what she was sent to do, just like they sometimes have no choice but to take the life of a human to save a fellow comrade. She-as well as Reiner and Bertoldt, had no choice but to listen to those who commanded them to do it-to fulfill the mission and return home. He knows she never took pleasure in committing those crimes because he knew the real Annie had never.

He realizes with a sinking feeling that even if she weren’t hundreds of miles away from the ocean they’ve currently set camp at, even if she were to awaken from her crystal slumber after a year, she would never talk to the person who had aided in her capture. But above all, and perhaps the worse feeling: he can’t bring himself to hate her, because now all he wants to do is to see her again.

 

 

 

Note: The unknown boy with the “bristled hair” is of course, Marcel Berwick.


End file.
